You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a television. But apparently more than half of you naughty things would happily cheat on a paid subscription service given half the chance. According to a survey by PYMNTS.com, 60% of people who subscribe to a retail subscription service admit to at least occasionally gaming the system.

Retail subscriptions like Amazon’s (AMZN) ‘Subscribe and Save’, and clothing retailer Stitch Fix’s (SFIX) subscription clothing box, exploded in popularity during Covid while we were bored and isolated at home. 🏡 But as cost pressures start to bite, many of us have taken to repeatedly milking introductory offers and discounts. Cheating tactics vary from creating multiple accounts to access those intro deals, to guessing discount codes. However, one of the more common ways people admitted to cheating was scoring referral benefits by donning a fake moustache and referring to themselves under new email addresses. 🧔

Is 2022 turning into ‘the year of cheating’? While Netflix (NFLX) was off counting the 100 million households they estimate are cheating on their service, the world of chess has been grappling with their own huge cheating scandal, which is anything but black and white. ♟️ Pop rocker Adam Levine has allegedly been trying to make cheat moves too, with ‘cringe’ Instagram DMs. Speaking of having no game, cheating in video games is getting so bad that last month game makers Electronic Arts (EA) announced a new kernel-level anti-cheat system for their PC games to stop hackers and cheaters ruining the game for the rest of us.

Is the internet to blame? Probably. According to the PYMNTS.com survey, the one group least likely to cheat on a subscription are baby boomers and seniors. Only 16% of boomers admitted to cheating on subscription services. ‘Though whether that was because of ethics or a lack of tech-savvy skills preventing boomers from turning on cheat-mode was unclear. 😛